New weapons help document & HTML template
 

I have what I think is a pretty good idea. Why not write a program that builds a HTML document template and then parses the existing SE4 data files for information on weapons components and fills in the template information in dynamic fashion?

There are quite a few Quake log file parsers that do exactly this (AEStats for one) and they work great. The advantage to this approach is that all you have to do to update this help document when a new patch comes out is re-run the program and regenerate the HTML based on the very Lastest info contained in the text files. No more wondering what changes were made to which weapons. It would always be up to date.

In addition, you can use existing game graphics to include pictures of each weapon and component along with their stats. Looks spiffy.

I have constructed just such a sample HTML document template that contains only the Anti-proton Beam weapon entry, just so everyone can see what I mean. It's attached here to take look at. Just copy it to your SE4 "Manual" subdirectory so it knows where to find the graphics for the game. Also make sure it has a .html extension on the filename.

A really good language to do this project in would be Perl but it requires you to have Perl installed on your PC to run the program so that's no good. C++ might by kind of clunky.

Are there any programmers out there that might be interested in taking this on as a project? It could well be extended beyond just the weapons to all components if desired. I think this would be of great benefit to the SE4 community. Once you get the HTML template coded, the rest is pretty trivial programming.

So what do you all think?

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Great idea. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Unzip this program into a new directory and tell where to find components.txt and where to find the component pictures. It will create HTML files using ColdSteel's template for all the weapons and store them in the directory you run the program out of. The image path is absolute so you don't have to create the directory in your se4 path.

While writing this program, I noticed that Tractor Beam II has two lines with different values for Weapon Display. I think the second one should be deleted and that this is a BUG! My program displays an error message when it reads the second one but it doesn't affect the program's performance.

Let me know what you think and/or what changes you would like to see.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Wow raynor, thanks!!!!! http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon10.gif
That was really, really fast. I can't believe just how great this SE4 community is!

What did you end up coding it in? C++?

I do think we need one more piece of html to make it a bit more user friendly and that's a main html index page that has all the weapon links. Basically it would just have links to each of the html files that your program creates.

Would you like me to go ahead and create that template? We could either use that as a static index page distributed along with your program file or you could also generate it from your program along with the other html files.

If you do include it in your program then any additional weapons that might get added later by MM would automatically have a link generated dynamically which is the main advantage over just having a static page. The other advantage is that your program would be the only thing that needs distributing. With the static approach we'd need to distribute the index and the program which is just a tiny bit messier and not quite as elegant.

So, let me know which way you'd prefer and if you want me to go ahead generate a main index page template.

Once finished I think it should be posted over in the mods forum. We could also provide it as another resource to the new documentation project that some of the community here have just started up. I hope everyone will take a look at the html pages that raynor's program generates and let us know if we missed anything as far as useful information in the template.

Also, if people do find the utility useful, this concept could be extended to all components not just weapons.

Thanks again, raynor. This is just great and I'm sure this will be very useful to everyone.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

I am simply knocked out!

Raynor, Cold Steel, both you guys seriously deserve a community service award for this. This is simply outstanding work.

I hereby award this project the Possum Pawprint of Approval http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

And I do very much agree with CS's suggestion for an index file to top it all off. DAMN, this is good work; what a great way to start my SE4 day http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by ColdSteel:
C++ might by kind of clunky.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Since when is C++ clunky? http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Thanks for the comments, y'all. I'm glad you liked it and that I could give back a little to the SE4 community.

Oh, hi Will. Er, I may not have much in the way of my share of work on the manual since I spent some time writing this program instead. What can I say? Programmers much prefer writing code to writing documentation. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

ColdSteel, it would be great if you could create an HTML template for the index page. We definitely, definitely want the program to generate everything. That way the program will work also for those folks who have added their own components.

This program is written in Object Pascal (Borland Delphi).

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Okay, I'm on it.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

raynor, I noticed one thing in your program that you might want to change. It's currently putting in the "Family" number rather that the "Weapon Family" number in the templates. As an example, for the Anti-Proton Beam, the Family number is 2000, while the Weapon Family number is 1. I chose to plug in the Weapon Family in the template because that's the one used in the AI_DesignCreation.txt file. We could always put both in there if people want them, I just thought the Weapon Family was the one most used.

Still working on the Index template. Bear with me, this is my "learn HTML at Last" fun project for the week. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

raynor, here's the weapon component html index. Just a few notes on it:

1) I included the SE4 Version number in there so folks can see what Version the document was created from. If you can turn the Version into a variable and pull the latest one from the top of the history.txt file that would be great.

2) I created the weapon links entries as two columns and only created the first 6 entries to establish the pattern for you. You can use whatever order you want to populate the tables. Probably just listing them in the order they come in from the data file would work fine. They're probably in order by Family or Weapon family in there anyway.

3) I made the index page title a link to the botton of the list and put in some brief "about this document" info and a Version number there. Feel free to change anything there or add stuff as you see fit.

4) I wanted to ask if you thought it might be better to create the index file in the same directory as all the other html files or instead stick it in the top directory all by itself and put all the other html files in a subdirectory beneath that. Your choice on that, whatever you think best.

5) There's a message right below this one that describes a very minor glitch in the first template for the Weapon Family entry.

Thanks again for helping with this little project. It's been a lot of fun playing with the html and I think its turning out even better than I thought it would. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif

If this utility is well recieved, what do you think about us extending it later on to handle the rest of the components as well?

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

raynor, after I posted the two Messages below here, I realized that the original weapon template was missing a very important piece of information. That information being the Weapon Reload Rate. I also found two small HTML errors in the original template toward the end where the range and damage tables are displayed (in the very Last two tables). This is a copy and paste error. The error sections look like this:

&lt;/TABLE&gt;
&lt;/TABLE&gt;&lt;TABLE BORDER=1 CELLPADDING=5 CELLSPACING=1 BORDERCOLOR="#545A8C"&gt;

There is a repeated "&lt;/TABLE&gt;" entry on the second line that doesn't belong. The lines should look like this instead:

&lt;/TABLE&gt;
TABLE BORDER=1 CELLPADDING=5 CELLSPACING=1 BORDERCOLOR="#545A8C"&gt;

Posted here is an updated Version of the template that adds the Weapon Reload Rate entry and corrects these two errors.

The Main Index Page HTML template is available in my previous post this evening.

Thanks and mucho sorry for the changes. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Not a problem on the Manual, raynor... I ran into some trouble myself, this lab report took longer than I thought, I only have a little done on it myself http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

We can just incorperate these programs into it http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Over in the Mod Forum, I posted a new Version that also generates an 'index.html' file. I fixed the Weapon Family problem, added the Weapon Reload Rate and, I think, got the HTML right. I went ahead and alphabetized them. Let me know if you think it would be better to put them in Weapon Family order.

I think adding the Version number is a good idea but I didn't have time for it tonite. Do you think it would also be a good idea to let folks type in their own comment that will appear in the index page if not at the bottom of every page? That way they could include a comment like: Dave's Mod.

It's a good idea to put the HTML files in a different directory from the HTML files. That should make it much easier to find the index file. It is something to think about for a later Version.

It's pretty cool when we can both have fun working on a project like this that might be useful to others. If we get some more positive feedback, I think it would be fun to expand this program to include all the components.

Oh! BTW, do you know any way to alter the HTML for the table so that the single, double and triple digit damage types all line up? I think probably it is just a matter of specifying absolute pixel widths for each table cell? Thanks!

[This message has been edited by raynor (edited 19 March 2001).]

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

raynor, thanks for the fixes, tweaks, enhancements. I agree that it's totally cool that we can do this together and hopefully we can expand on it.

I do think it's a good idea to allow a comment to identify a specific mod otherwise people might get confused as to what they're really looking it. Might be good to have a default comment of "Standard SE4 data files" or something like that in there that they could change with the comment.

Yes, I noticed the cell alignment problem too and it's bugging me. I'll work on finding a solution for that.

There's a lot of other parts of the SE4 game that could also be documented this same way. One quick example would be races. You could have a HTML document generated for each race that shows their race picture, all their ships and units and all their major AI setting in an organized fashion. Would be really cool, I think. Especially for the user created races and shipsets.
This stuff is fun! http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Thanks again.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

I am getting an access violation when I try to use it. I am using one of the modes that has the Sprint Ship Missile and the Heavy Bombardment Missile. It works for the sprint missile but fails at Heavy Bombardment Missile or immediately prior to Meson. Attached is screen shot of error.

I think this is really great!

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Thanks for trying it out on your mod'd components.txt, Jourin!

Could you please email me your components.txt file so I can run the program on it and see what happens? (I included my email address in the readme file with the program.) Thanks.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Hi raynor and coldsteel,

this is really good work. And an Index is a good idea.

Very nice ...

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

raynor, I just sent you some email with the fix to the "Range and Damage" inconsistent cell size problem. Other info and comments in there as well. Let me know if I can do anything else to help.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Hello ColdSteel !

Just tried out CompHTML and had some minor quibbles about it
- there are some errors and "not-so-nices" in the HMTL code (I promised to look through it and send raynor some "sample pages" this weekend)
- and I would suggest moving all format/layout info into a seperate .css file, so it would be easier (or possible at all) to adjust colours and font size for personal preference.

What do you think about that ?!

Arralen

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Hi Arralen,

I too found some errors Last night in the first template and sent the corrections to raynor. My HTML editor error checker now say everything is fine.

I'm not sure how to move the formatting out into another file as you suggest. This is my "learn HTML" project and I've never played with it before so I'll freely admit that I'm a rank beginner when it comes to this stuff.

Here is the latest updated SE4Weapons HTML template that I just sent to raynor. It fixes a problem with cell sizes for the Range and Damage Tables. The latest SE4index HTML template is available in an earlier message under this topic. If you want to play with them and make suggestions or improvements, please feel free to do so. Bear in mind that raynor has to replicate everything in the templates in his code within the program so some reformatting when he does that is probably inevitable.

Thanks for the input.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Ok, I'll have a look at it tomorrow (at work http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif ), fi I find the time for this.

Doing everything in CascadingStyleSheets in a seperate file will in fact make the programming a lot easier - you needn't care about layout etc., as you can adjust this later when the acutal HTML-pages are already generated ..

I hope I can get some example done soon !!

A.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Guys, if you want to learn more about CSS, which really is very very cool stuff, go to Webmonkey. The CSS tutorial just rocks too hard for words.

A few caveats -

1. Netscape still does not properly implement some features of CSS.

2. Absolute positioning and z-index are massively cool features, but only really display properly when viewed at the same resolution for which they were created http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

If you need any help with all that positioning and stuff, send it along to me (e-mail is cerban_imperium@yahoo.com). I've been doing HTML for a hobby for about... wow... four years (this is where my young age starts to feel, very, very old...). I got into CSS and dHTML Last year, and am fairly good at making them cross-browser/platform compatible (though I can only test on Windows http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif )

For the alignment of the weapons, I haven't taken a look at the HTML code you have, but from looking at the problem the way you set it up, the following should work (the angle brackets will be represented by parenthesis ( & ), since forums seem to mess up HTML most of the time, even when they "shouldn't".):

(table)(tr)(td width="30" align="right")1(/td)(td width="30" align="right")2(/td)(td width="30" align="right")3(/td)(/tr)(/table)

That would give you a table with fixed values for the width, and the values inside the table data (td) tags aligned to the right (I believe that otherwise, they are aligned to the center, but, it's been a while since I've used tables). If you want to use CSS on the individual data stuff, you should switch from (table) to (div), but that's just a pain in the @$$, and more trouble than it's worth for something like this.

Oh, and sorry if the lowercase tags mess up anything that you've learned... it's not necessary to have them capitalized in HTML, and the new XML and XHTML specs call for lowercase only tags... plus lowercase tags have been my style from the beginning, because I found capitalized tags to be very annoying...

Some things on CSS: those two things are only problems if you don't know how to implement a fix to them http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif Give Netscape a break, IE doesn't implement some of CSS's features either, they just have a few more of them. Absolute positioning works fine with a bit of JavaScript to determine the user's screen area (between toolbars, statusbars, scrollbars, etc.), and z-index doesn't have much to do with screen size, but is buggy in all browsers.

You guys should consider helping out with the manual too http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

And, one final thing: WebMonkey rules. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

First of all, this is really great stuff. Thanks alot for all your efforts.

I was wonder if there is a neater way to do this than creating a pile of HTML and then an index page to refer to it.
It might be a little neater and also user invisible with regards to updates and changes of the weapons stats to create the html page on the fly (maybe to a temp file)and then display it, then delete the html file afterwards. Effectively making it a viewing program rather than a html creator program. This way the user can just run the program which brings up a (quickly created) index page and then as they click on a item it then creates and displays the relevant page. This would also relieve the average user from having to remember to rerun the program to update their html files when they recieve a new patch or mod.

Any thoughts? More effort than it is worth?

I apologise if this is well away from your intended goals, I mean no slight to your work and efforts.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

I posted a new Version (1.01) in the same message over in the Mod Forum. Pretty cool how you can delete your old files and upload new ones. The new Version fixes the crashing problem and tweaks the HTML for the range/damage section. Thanks to Arralen and Jourin for helping me find the bugs!

Thanks for the comment and the idea, Griffin! It is definitely something to think about for the future.

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Will -
OK, you know more than I do. My apologies for giving inaccurate information.

Cold Steel and raynor -
I love you guys; this is fine work. Thank you both very much yet again. I just grabbed the new v1.01 from the Mods Forum. Great work, just great http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Griffin -
No, I have to politely disagree. I very much like having the HTML files right there where I can look at them. Maybe that's just me http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

Will, thanks for the offer. If I get stuck, I'll be sure to give you a yell. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

On the alignment issue, that's just exactly what I did yesterday to fix the cell problem except that I made them each 33 pixels wide instead of 30 as you suggested. Nice to know I wasn't way off base on that. raynor has the fix but he crashed early Last night and it may be a little while before he can get the new Version out. He also has some other things he wants to add to spiff it up some more.

I've been thinking about CSS and I'm leaning away from using that just because I want this to be as standard and compatible as possible. From my reading it seems that style sheets might cause some problems with non MS Explorer browsers and make maintaining this more work than I'd like it to be. I tend to take the K.I.S.S. principal fairly seriously.

As for helping out with the manual project, it's my hope that what raynor and I are doing can be directly incorporated into it. I think raynor is already working on that project as well. The advantage to the approach we're taking is:

1) The HTML documentation is easily updated in an automated fashion whenever new SE4 patches come out. Becuase of this the document information is never out of date.

2) Documentation can be generated for user mods just as easily as for the standard game.

3) A very wide range of SE4 information can be generated in an automated fashion that would take literally weeks or months to generate by hand.

We have some neat ideas on how this technique can be extended to document racesets, facilities, non-weapon components, ship designs, weapon comparisons, etc. With all the data files we have to work with there are a lot of areas in which we could use this approach. I can't help it, I'm a programmer, I'm always looking for ways to automate tedious tasks. So, okay, I'm lazy too, what can I say? LOL. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif

Now off to work (gah!).

Re: New weapons help document & HTML template
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Possum:
Will -
OK, you know more than I do. My apologies for giving inaccurate information.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Well, I know more than a lot of people, but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion on this one thing... everyone can be mistaken about just about anything (that includes me, I've probably screwed up on details a few times in this forum).

Oh, and I agree that I would rather have actual HTML files... just stash 'em in a folder to keep those that don't know what they're doing safe http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

I'll have to go download that... sometime... many things going on at once, quite confusing http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif